Gun Guys by Dan Baum Read Free Book Online Page A

into murderers. Depending on how you did the math, 1989 to 2010 may have seen the fastest and steepest drop in crime ever recorded in the United States. To ice the cake, most kinds of gun
accidents
had also decreased. Maybe the country had simply been lucky.
    The theories as to why crime rates were falling ranged from data-conscious policing to stricter sentencing. The authors of
Freakonomics
went so far as to suggest that the drop in crime was a by-product of legalizing abortion in the 1970s: Fewer unwanted, underparented babies yielded fewer desperate young men. Whatever the cause, the decrease in crime had brought a new twist to gun politics.
    Usually, the NRA and the gun business preferred to maintain the fiction that crime was out of control and everyone should own a gun for self-defense. But after the shall-issue revolution, they claimed credit for the drop in crime. Criminals were afraid to prey on people who might be armed, they argued, so more gun ownership meant less crime.
    It was easy to argue that crime was falling everywhere, not just in shall-issue states, and falling faster in some restrictive states than in some shall-issue states. The back-and-forth over the effect of shall-issue laws demonstrated precisely why statistics are almost useless when debating gun policy; people read into identical data what they want to see. Few are going to be shaken off their fondness or antipathy for guns by a page of statistics.
    This much, though, was beyond debate: Almost seven million people had obtained carry permits in the two dozen or so years since Florida had risen up, and when you ran the numbers, legal gun carriers committed murder at a quarter the rate of the general population.
    A subset of the “more guns, less crime” debate erupted in 1995 over how often law-abiding citizens used guns to defend themselves. It was an important question, because if lawful defensive gun use happened often,that would support the movement to make carry permits easier to get. If it was rare, it would weaken the need for permissive carry. Everybody agreed that defensive gun use rarely ended in shots fired and usually involved nothing more than brandishing the gun or announcing, “I’ve got a gun.” Beyond that, nobody agreed on anything.
    Two prominent gun researchers squared off. In one corner was Gary Kleck, of Florida State University, a longtime critic of most gun-control laws. Relying on a collection of telephone and questionnaire surveys, he came up with a breathtaking 2.5 million defensive gun uses a year, or more than 6,800 a day. Across the ring from Kleck was Harvard’s David Hemenway, who throughout his career had been as consistently anti-gun as Kleck was pro. Using the government’s National Crime Victimization Survey, Hemenway came up with only 80,000 defensive gun uses a year.
    I interviewed both men on the phone, and each predictably disparaged the other’s work in the harshest terms, as though
no gentleman
would consider using the data the other had chosen. Their pissing match went on for years in academic journals. Each had his defenders. The NRA weighed in on Kleck’s behalf, citing his 2.5 million number as proof that guns were important to public safety. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the country’s leading proponent of stricter gun laws, backed Hemenway’s number as evidence that the utility of private gun ownership was overrated. In 2004, the National Research Council stepped into the ring as referee and essentially called off the match. “Ultimately, the committee found no comfort in numbers: the existing surveys do not resolve the ongoing questions,” it wrote.
    I slogged through all the arguments, and what came through most clearly was that both sides had lost track of the obvious: Even Hemenway’s lower number was huge. “Only” 80,000 a year meant that 220 times a day, Americans were protecting themselves with firearms one way or another. This meant that eight times as many